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Case Studies & Reviews
Cisco Viptela SD-WAN Struggles to Meet SD-WAN Requirements
Secure SD-WAN connectivity has become mission-critical for organizations needing to intelligently interconnect their remote locations quickly and securely. The challenge is that many SD-WAN solutions don’t meet those requirements. Some only work in specific use cases. Others have significant technology limitations. Most have failed to seamlessly integrate security into their solutions.
Cisco’s SD-WAN solution is one example. Cisco continues to struggle with merging the Viptela SD-WAN software it acquired in 2017 and its point security offerings into its ISR platform. This negatively impacts the reliability, security, performance, and ease of management organizations like yours require.
Why Organizations are Switching to Fortinet
| Fortinet | Cisco | |
| Increase Network Uptime and Reliability | Fortinet Secure SD-WAN uses a decentralized, fully autonomous controller architecture to avoid single points of failure and controller scaling limitations. | In May 2023, Cisco had a catastrophic certificate expiration issue that prevented CPEs from authenticating with the controller. This affected ALL legacy Viptela customers, taking down entire networks and causing widespread business disruption. |
| Ensure Predictable Performance | Fortinet’s fully validated Secure SD-WAN solution is built on our FortiGate platform. It natively includes ASIC-accelerated security inspection, AI-powered threat intelligence, fully integrated security designed for SD-WAN environments, and seamless integration with the extended Security Fabric. | Cisco SD-WAN relies on point solutions not designed to work as a cohesive security system. ISR routers trying to perform deep packet inspection suffer from severe performance degradation. The solution’s security effectiveness has also never been validated by a third party. Effective security is a critical component of any SD-WAN deployment. |
| Increase Security Effectiveness | Fortinet’s patented SD-WAN ASIC and decentralized fully autonomous controller architecture ensures optimal user experience under any load. | Because of its piecemeal architectural approach, Cisco SD-WAN has chronic performance and scaling limitations that can significantly impact user experience. |
| Simplify Architecture and Operations | Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides true single-pane-of-glass management for both networking and security to ensure consistency and simplicity in deploying, optimizing, and troubleshooting any aspect of your SD-WAN solution, and lower your TCO. | Another example of Cisco’s incomplete strategy is that its security, SD-WAN, switches, and APs are all managed using different consoles, creating unnecessary complexity and overhead. |
| Achieve Higher ROI | Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides a comprehensive feature set with unrestricted WAN bandwidth consumption, all included in the base offering, enhancing the return on investment (ROI). | The pricing structure of Cisco SD-WAN is divided into multiple tiers based on both features and bandwidth consumption. There are three tiers for feature services and four tiers for bandwidth consumption. This tiered approach can introduce complexity and result in higher costs, particularly for licenses spanning over 3 or 5 years. |
Enterprise Analyst Recognition
2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SD-WAN
2023 CyberRatings.org Enterprise SD-WAN Report
Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN
Fortinet is a Leader and placed highest in Ability to Execute. AGAIN.
We’ve done it again! Fortinet is the only vendor to place highest in Ability to Execute 3 years in a row. And, we’ve been named a Leader for the 4th year in a row. We believe this is because our innovative secure SD-WAN solution lets you uniquely:
- Simplify architecture with accelerated security and networking convergence
- Achieve operational efficiencies across all WAN and cloud edges
- Deliver superior quality of experience to users
Fortinet Achieved a Recommended Rating in 2023 CyberRatings.
CyberRatings.org recently conducted independent testing of SD-WAN solutions against their SD-WAN Test Methodology v2.0 at their lab in Austin, Texas. Fortinet received a “Recommended” rating from CyberRatings.org for our Secure SD-WAN solution. The report states, “The Fortinet SD-WAN handled all use cases with ease and proved to be highly reliable and capable and should be on everyone's short list."
Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study Shows 300% ROI for Fortinet Secure SD-WAN Enterprise Deployments
Fortinet commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to analyze the value that enterprises are able to achieve by deploying Fortinet Secure SD-WAN. The TEI study examines both the network and security impact on businesses.
Customer Quotes
We needed more protection for our students because we're really good at protecting them on-premises with the UTM on the firewalls. But we needed that functionality to move with them wherever they went anywhere, anytime. We moved to SASE because it was an evolution for us...it was moving away from the concept of, ‘we teach in the school,’ to allowing them to learn from anywhere in the world.”
- Ryan Buhrow, Enterprise System Engineer, Upper Grand District School Board
Fortinet came out on top. FortiSASE seamlessly integrates with our existing products while protecting our previous Fortinet investments. And, it was easy to extend FortiClient to FortiSASE, which freed us from needing to train our people on a new SASE solution. FortiSASE was really the next step in our network evolution."
- Peter VanDorp, Cybersecurity Analyst, Wellington Catholic District School Board
We want to always improve our security posture, but we also want to make it easier for the end users. We do not want them to have to log into multiple systems or making it difficult just to log into their laptops or their desktops.”
- Richard Richison, Director of Global Operations, Repligen
Gartner Peer Reviews
For the fourth year in a row, Fortinet has been recognized with the Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for SD-WAN with the highest number of customer reviews of all vendors. 
★★★★★
"Fortinet SD-WAN Is The Solution You Have Been Looking For"
"We had a delightful experience with the whole Fortinet SD-WAN experience. We were wonderfully surprised by the features of the product and would recommend this further across people in similar industries."
— Manager, IT
★★★★★
"Secure Cost Effective, Easy To Handle Without Compromising Quality"
"SD-WAN is really easy to implement and the best part, we can fine tune utilization based on priority. We have to migrate from the traditional approach (Leased line...). With SD-WAN, we managed it with the support of Fortinet, and to be honest, anyone can manage it as they explain in detail"
— Senior System Analyst, IT
★★★★★
"Wonderful Product For SD-WAN Deployment"
"We are very Happy with the Product. It offers very good visibility and easy configuration."
— DGM, IT Security and Risk Management
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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN, Jonathan Forest, Naresh Singh, Andrew Lerner, Karen Brown, 27 September 2023.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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